by ·Comments Off on The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973, Wojciech Has)

After Saragossa Manuscript, another Wojciech Has movie full of madness, beautifully filmed, and based on an eccentric novel, which didn’t really work for me. Jan Nowicki (Barrier) goes to a time-warping hospital to find his not-dead-yet dad, then wanders through fantastical episodes, full of delirious clutter (and copious cobwebs) in the tradition of Szulkin and Hard to be a God.

Opens with our guy getting directions from a blind train conductor, ends with him having become the conductor – I guess it all makes sense if you’d read the Bruno Schulz novel, or else making sense isn’t the point. I wasn’t expecting a musical number, but he visits the Jewish neighborhood and they can’t help themselves.

Smart guys like Jake and Yui and PD got it, I’m more on Paul‘s side.

Helmeted protag with his dead father and carnival birdheads:

by ·Comments Off on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972, Jonas Mekas)

“Hey, I escaped the ropes of time once more.” Between shorter beginning and end chapters, the hourlong middle is a diary of a week spent with family in Lithuania, in a hundred numbered chapters. Handheld scenes, sometimes nicely composed and sometimes quick and jittery, with in-camera editing. See: Sicinski

Jonas and mother:

Episode 61: the duck was captured but not harmed:

by ·Comments Off on The Scenic Route (1978, Mark Rappaport)

Dry Detached Experimental Arthouse Cinema but with a bit of dramatic heat, via heightened music, color, poses.

Estelle narrates from her notebooks. “I pretended I was malleable… I know it’ll happen again.” Her troublesome sister comes to stay, and they juggle two men between them – mostly Mustache Paul but also Estelle’s ex Jack, counting down until at least one of these men gets murdered.

They seem to have no life or interests besides men and each other. They all disco dance in the living room, because it is 1978. Eventually Paul tries to sister-swap, creeping into Estelle’s bed, not having listened to the backstory to realize this is how you get stabbed.

Mostly the movie isn’t a straight narrative but a Ruizian carousel of framing games. The DP has range, shot this and Girlfriends, Q: The Winged Serpent, The Dead, and Freddy vs. Jason. Mustache Paul is better known as a writer of Meet Joe Black.

by ·Comments Off on Woodstock (1970, Michael Wadleigh)

Long doc, full of split-screens to fit as much rock action into the widescreen frame as possible, and still manages to miss major events (Creedence) in favor of a portrait of the guy who cleans the toilets (a highlight) and reporters hounding the fest organizer over whether the fest is losing money. With 30+ hours of music recorded that weekend plus all the interviews and split-screens, this event would be a prime candidate for the Eno treatment.

by ·Comments Off on Desperate Living (1977, John Waters)

Peggy is recovering from a breakdown when she and her maid Griselda kill Peggy’s husband and go on the run. They get molested by a policeman in exchange for help escaping, and make it to a shanty town run by evil queen Edith Massey. These are all Waters regulars except for their new blonde lesbian roommake Muffy (“Nightclub Stripper” in Lady Street Fighter the same year), whose gf Mole gets a sex change at the end, but gets angry-inch’d. Movie is half wonderful, and half annoying (everyone is yelling all the time).

by ·Comments Off on I Only Want You to Love Me (1976, Rainer Fassbinder)

Not many places the story can go after opening with our guy in jail. It rewinds to him building a house for his hateful mom, then further, as a boy also failing to please mom. After the house, he moves new wife Erika to Munich and gets a construction job, where he works himself half to death (this is my second movie of the week where someone finances some furniture). Sure he’s a shopaholic capitalist, but he simply bought into the dream that if you work hard at a job you’re very good at, you can afford a comfortable life for your family. She gets pregnant, moves in with her parents, and he takes it hard, working more overtime and buying more stuff until he cracks under the strain and murders a friendly landlord.

Before the furniture arrived:

Mouseover to turn your murder-witness neighbor into your disappointed mother:
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by ·Comments Off on Zabriskie Point (1970, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Opens with a tiresome assembly of college revolutionaries, and closes with a fancy house exploding again and again, all of its contents blasted into the air in lovely slow-motion.

In between is a shaggy story of aimless young people with inconsistent dubbing, just what you’d expect from Antonioni. Mark, a white guy with sideburns, has maybe shot a cop and definitely stolen a plane. He’s flying over the desert when he spots a girl in a car, and starts casually north-by-northwesting her. This is Daria, who is either heading to a work meeting with her boss or trying to ditch it and find a meditation retreat. These two lovebirds Gerry themselves into the desert, have a phantom orgy with twenty other couples, then repaint the plane and he takes off, only to be shot to death by cops as soon as he lands. She stumbles into her work meeting but seems distracted by news of her new boyfriend’s murder, goes outside and imagines it all blowing up again and again and again.

Rosenbaum:

Antonioni creates a portrait of a volatile America that he (as a foreigner) and the hippies (as outsiders) see more clearly than others … Most of the major sequences make scant use of the dialogue or acting, and the plot mainly functions as a pretext for creating these sequences. Moods, landscapes, and a continual oscillation between documentary and abstraction are the central tools at Antonioni’s disposal, and the characters drift through the “dialogue of ambiance” like tour guides from the physical world.

by ·Comments Off on Scenes from Under Childhood (1970, Stan Brakhage)

I’ve watched part one before. Color fields flash and fade. Shots of the house and children have been turned into reddish defocused funhouse blobs. Almost-normal photography at the very end of a young kid feeding an even younger kid with a spoon.

2. Distinct textures in this one, not just more of the same. Added to the funhouse effect is some Melies house transformations with the kids as actors/witnesses, shimmering particle effects, and some really nice superimpositions, while the film processing looks like someone turning the color and tint up and down on a TV. The kids watch Shirley Temple on their own TV. Wild textures and flames, and a playhouse in the real house so he can mess with our sense of scale.

3. Ever more recognizable images of human activities. Getting out of the house more too, a picnic then a road trip. I never know how much of the apparently domestic footage is staged scenes vs. the rest of the family just living their lives while dad buzzes around them with a camera stuck to his face. If the latter, then it’s a fairly nude household.

4. Opens on his wife crying, then the kids are fighting too – this is the discord episode. A trip to the pool is edited into a fleshy mashup, two birds seen dimly. Stan does the dishes, and the color fields from part one return with a vengeance. Everyone shows us their penis then it wraps up at a baseball game.

I played the Silents Shuffle – MVP of each section: Anoushka Shankar, Squarepusher, Zorn’s Book of Angels, Orbital.

by ·Comments Off on Chinese Roulette (1976, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mom (Petra von Kant) and Dad (Alex Allerson of all the ’76 Fassbinders) are leaving town on separate business trips, leaving their daughter with the mute nurse (Godard’s Married Woman). But all three adults are having secret affairs, and head to the same country house, where they try to play it off and have a good time together since they’re all equally busted. Dad is with hottie Anna Karina, mom is with dad’s employee Bruno, the nanny is with blonde Volker Spengler (fly guy of Satan’s Brew).

This is too many major actors in one place, and the daughter can’t hold her own, also is weirdly dubbed, but she gets to dance on her crutches to Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” Of course the adults end up playing mind games, and the vibes turn very sour during the titular Q&A guessing game, then Mom shoots the Mute Nurse, kind of a bum ending.

honi soit qui mal y pense: